


catharsis (like sick dogs)

by spaceducky



Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Alexis | Quackity-centric, Angst, Everyone Needs A Hug, Hurt No Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Jan06, Post-War, o7 - Freeform, they need therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-11
Updated: 2021-01-11
Packaged: 2021-03-16 00:40:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28697829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spaceducky/pseuds/spaceducky
Summary: He feels like he’s floating. The days since Schlatt has died feel blurry and out of synch, as if the amount of hours in a day seem to change and the idea of reality is a myth in itself.It’s weird, being in limbo.Limbo doesn’t leave him, not when Tommy is exiled, not when Karl first hugs him to his chest, not when Tubbo first tells him to stop, and not even when Technoblade puts a pickaxe straight through his teeth.----Alternatively: Quackity reflects on Schlatt's death and the crater of L'manberg.
Relationships: Alexis | Quackity & Jschlatt, Alexis | Quackity & Karl Jacobs & Sapnap, Alexis | Quackity & Toby Smith | Tubbo & TommyInnit
Comments: 6
Kudos: 86





	catharsis (like sick dogs)

**Author's Note:**

> A quick exploration of Quackity after Schlatt has died and L'manberg has died.
> 
> TW// mentions of blood and explosions, hinted abuse, depictions of blood and injury, discussion of death

There’s a sickening moment, where the realization that Quackity could lie under Schlatt, under L’manberg, and remain completely open, completely vulnerable, and not even break, makes him want to throw up.

He used to crumble, to writhe, under the pressure of it all.

It’s hard to think Schlatt didn’t always break him.

 _L’manberg_ didn’t always break him.

The end of his time in the cabinet rests in his mind like a subtle reminder and the skeletal form of L’manberg serves as an alarm.

And suddenly he’s back there again, to when it breaks him.

There was a time it didn’t, he thinks, and the wind whispers, _there was also a place._

But ‘place’ holds no meaning in a land in which the ‘place’ had started to assimilate God.

(L’manberg falls, L’manberg falls and a boy a man another boy a woman a father a son a brother a people- they weep)

It doesn’t take long for time to also hold no meaning.

Quackity remembers waking up three months ago in the White House the same way he remembers waking up in Pogtopia and waking up in a cold sweat, body doused in anxiety, in his new L’manberg house swaddled in shadows.

Sometimes Quackity thinks he’s just sick.

He drinks again for the first time since Schlatt poured him a glass, and Quackity can’t quite quell the anxiety that blossoms in his chest, because as he turns to the mirror there’s a moment of sheer _oh God_ , and Quackity could have sworn he saw ram horns in the folds of his beanie.

The horns hang over his shoulders, they weigh his head down, and sometimes Quackity swears he sees another pair of horns hanging around the newly rebuilt L’manberg. 

He feels like he’s floating. The days since Schlatt has died feel blurry and out of synch, as if the amount of hours in a day seems to change and the idea of reality is a myth in itself.

It’s weird, being in limbo.

Limbo doesn’t leave him, not when Tommy is exiled, not when Karl first hugs him to his chest, not when Tubbo first tells him to stop, and not even when Technoblade puts a pickaxe straight through his teeth.

(It’s a strange battle, being the roll of the butcher, and in a sick way he can feel Schlatt’s fingers curling into his jaw-

“Good boy,”

It’s the same Schlatt that grabs his hands a looks at him with a pained expression-

“You’re not a killer, Quackity,”

Quackity throws up, throws up fingers and hard metal nails and throws up El Rapids throws up feathers coated in blood -his blood, Schlatts blood- and weeps.)

He feels dead even when Karl cards his fingers through the hair curling at the nape of his neck. Quackity wonders if he can smell his rotten skin beneath his clothes.

He gets up every morning and pours his carcass into his clothes, _his suit clothes,_ and prays to whatever broken ideal he believes in that Karl and Sapnap and all of L’manberg won’t smell the decay that lurks inside him.

But it’s awkwardly liberating.

George laughs at him and Karl laughs at him and Sapnap laughs at him- but they all laugh with him as well.

Karl and Sapnap stay up on the phone with him as they jokingly argue because Quackity was too scared they’d kill each other, like it was normal for lovers to be synonymous to killers-

And so they laugh.

Quackity shows them his horse and they smile, _Quackity_ smiles, and in that moment he doesn’t feel like a broken bone, doesn’t feel like a corpse, doesn’t feel stupid and alone and walked over and-

Then L’manberg blows up.

The entirety of the city wails and thrashes as Technoblade and Dream pummel it into the ground.

He watches as Tubbo stands shell shocked, with Tommy huddled close to him, arms tightly gripping onto each other, both looking like broken, bleeding soldiers.

(Quackity remembers the first time he saw Tubbo after the festival, standing like a ghost in Pogtopia.

Quackity remembers the scars.

He remembers the skin that peaked out from his shirt in less abundance than before, in all its peachy, gruesome glory.

Most of all he remembers the shadows formed by the stitches that lined the outside of some of his burns.

The marks lined up like little soldiers, all equally in place and all equally as uniform.

Quackity wonders if that’s what his bruises looked like to Schlatt, if they were soldiers, or if he saw them more like little wounded warriors, all equally as endearing and equally as pitiful.)

He hates it- the horrible tragedy that it has become- but he’s so _so_ tired.

Sapnap’s body is curled around his, and their blood bleeds into each other, wounds and skin and armor and weapons flush against each other.

It’s grossly romantic in a strange way he doesn’t understand, doesn't _want_ to understand.

Sapnap’s hand frames his face from where they are leaning against each other.

It smells like iron and smoke.

The ringing in his ears momentarily settles and there’s a strange moment of a catharsis, a part of him that feels no agony at L’manberg’s final fall.

Because now it’s over.

The need to flee, to run, has washed away from his body and now he just wants to sleep. It’s good this way, Quackity amends, because there’s no sadness this way.

His thoughts follow the rhythm of the last exploding pieces of tnt that fall from the sky.

They follow the rhythm of Sapanp’s hand and they follow the turmoil of Schlatt’s fingers on his shoulders, chasing after his trauma like a lost puppy- a sick dog.

Above them, Tubbo falls onto his knees and stares; Tommy pulls apart redstone contraptions at the same pace that Dream places down new pieces of tnt, igniting L’manberg into a glorious orchestra of gruesome percussion.

Quackity is pulling away from Sapnap before he’s aware he is.

“I’m gonna go help,”

Sapnap’s hand slides off his body and the two rise almost in sync. It gives Quackity a moment to take Sapnap in.

He looks bad, in a way Sapnap never does, and Quackity has to remind himself that it was Sapnap’s childhood friend, his best friend, his pretty much _brother,_ that just massacred an entire nation, Sapnap included. 

Quackity takes the information and folds it into a box in his mind. He tucks it next to a box called a Tubbo (which smells like gunpowder and buzzes at him constantly in a way that makes him guilty). He doesn’t get it, not yet.

When he climbs up to where Tommy and Tubbo are, the soot in the arid air stings his nose. It is relieving in a way that feels gross.

“Quackity?”

He angles his head towards Tommy.

“Help us tear these things apart, yea? Just remove- yea like that.”

The redstone feels like salt in his hands, like ashes- Schlatts ashes, L’manberg’s ashes, his own ashes-

He makes another box in his head.

After the awful mechanisms stop their fast paced clicking, the three of them, joined by Ghostbur, sit together on the obsidian over the crater.

The obsidian is neat, it hovers in perfect lines with perfectly perpendicular intersections. (It cuts through skin with perfectly lethal precision.)

“Should we sing it?”

The three turn to look at him. The stillness in his own hands is frightening. 

“The Anthem? One last time,” 

Ghostbur is a glowing presence around them.

His voice is as fuzzy and warm as always, “sure!” 

Quackity opens his mouth and waits for sounds to push past his teeth. 

“I heard there was a special place...”

Toy soldiers line up, faces flush and childish...

“Where men could go and emancipate...”

There's a boy, a best friend, and an older brother. 

“The brutality and the tyranny of their rulers...”

There's a man in a mask, he corners the soldiers and he steals from them, he hurts them and burns them. He stands up and plays God from behind a porcelain mask.

“Well this place is real we needn’t fret...”

Ghostly grass and a small caravan glow against the bloody pit below them.

“With wilbur...”

Curly brown hair wavers in the wind while the homely sound of an acoustic guitar accompanies the pull of his wrist. The man is bleeding, the man is decaying, dying, dead. In his place a ghost hums through the hole in his chest.

“Tommy,”

A 16 boy smiles like he’s dying, screams like he’s dying, and holds his best friend like they're both dying. He falls to pieces and shoots himself in the foot, he bleeds over himself, over his best friend, and over his dead brother's grave. 

“Tubbo,”

A 17 year old _~~president~~_ huddled over himself like he’s going to throw up, puppet strings, cleanly severed, hang from his fingertips, and the one around his neck looks scarily like a noose or a leash-

“Fuck Eret,”

A hand ghosts over a button, and suddenly there's nothing. But the same hand hovers over Nikki’s shoulder as L’manberg loses its name and the same one that holds a sword as they stand with the rebels. His cape has fallen _yet they call him the bastard._

“It’s a very big...”

The place is big and the place is real, so real it raised its hands forward and pushed a dagger through the chest of the people who resided in it. The concrete shackles of the city, shaped like protruding spruce logs, leave bruises on the wrists of the people. The people bleed. Was it worth it?

“And not blown up...”

The crater bleeds over their bodies. The jagged rocks stand unmoving, like the mouth of a dead man, teeth ready to kill, ready to hurt.

“L’manberg.”

Toy soldiers burn in the mouth of the crater. A God loses his friends and pulls at the rubber bands until they break. A ram dismembers a bird until they both can’t breathe. A father kills his son and suddenly, toy soldiers become human again, crying into each other’s necks. There is no bible, and there is no God.

“My L’manberg...”

Tommy and Tubbo in, voices hoarse and lacking their usual saturation 

“My L’manberg...”

Fire continues to burn below them.

“My L’manberg...”

They hover like corpses over the ruins of a broken heart and it’s pitiful: a dead man, two broken compases, and a fucked up version of Icarus, the one in which the man eats his dead fiance’s heart.

“My L’maaaa-aaaannn-berg.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for checking this out! This is the first thing I've written that was remotely coherent so I hope this is okay ahaha. I'd like to write some more in future, so feel free to leave some favorite smp moments or concepts in the comments :]


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